The Home Office Overhaul (going from version 5 to version 6, as I call it) is in full swing. Except it will take a while longer before I can properly update the website to reflect the new working conditions. I’ve been at this for a few days now and it seems there’s a few more days of work ahead of me because everything just sucks up time like crazy. The first two days were spent clearing everything out and moving the most essential services running on servers from the living room. Then another day to give everything a paint job. The past two days have been cable hell.

My dealer doesn’t have all the new equipment ready yet but did get me the imporant stuff I need to start, namely the new monitors. However, the various three and five meter DVI cables that were sent to them were white instead of black so we’re waiting for the arrival of the correct black cables. Without the cables there’s not much point in clearing out the office. The RAID backplanes have also not arrived yet but adding new workstations is not a requirement for starting this overhaul so that can wait. The cables are definitely more important.

Alas, Sallie and I were on vacation and spending about as little time with computers as possible and instead spent most of the time going to both a lot of favorite and new restaurants (I’ll save you the review of the spectacularly weird Bacon-Infused Caramel Sauce at Town Hall in San Francisco), taking pictures, etc. You can see most of the picks on my Flickr page where there are several new sets including a lot of pictures from our trip to Chicago, IL and Occidental, CA and some more from Tiburon, CA, and a few new ones from San Francisco, CA, and Santa Cruz where we hung out with friends and their cats as well as a set from Alcatraz.

I’m contemplating whether to find myself a host that doesn’t buckle under the pressure (of what I don’t believe to be excessive traffic) and would be able to cap the requests-per-second instead of just DISABLING AN ENTIRE SITE! Since this is just my personal site I’m not too concerned right this minute but I would have to conclude that hosting a website for your BUSINESS at Dreamhost is probably a VERY BAD idea. I’m open to suggestions for reliable hosting companies that do not have to resort to disabling entire sites when there are a mere 14.800 visitors in the span of 8 hours!

This is hillarious. Someone going around on some web forum and calling himself SniperX has been passing off my home office as his ‘gaming rig’. Check out what he’s been writing. Of course, what SniperX hasn’t realized is the fact that my office is famous enough that a lot of people have seen it and can spot someone representing it as their own. Bruno was kind enough to call out SniperX on his “bull manure” and bust him. The best part is when SniperX writes about his reason for posting images of my office, in his own words “people did not believe me when i told them my make and model of machine, so i posted it”. OK, that’s enough entertainment for me today.

After trying to figure out what to do with my photography pages and debating whether I should install an album module or write one myself like the quick hack that has been part of my site since I created it I’ve settled on using Flickr. I’ve uploaded a lot of my older shots and will continue to update it with new material as time permits. Anyone who feels the need to check out what I like to do and see when I’m not working in my home office, feel free to browse my photo collections at Flickr via my pictures page or through the following links.

Two days ago a friend of mine alerted me to a video he saw on a web portal of an ISP that had started a video service for its customers that is similar to YouTube and Google Video. One of the videos there, uploaded by a user that goes by the name of “bmhelli” (according to this and his website, Bernard Marius Hellinga a.k.a. Bernard Helli. from a town called Ermelo in The Netherlands) contained two TV commercials that were appended together. One introducing some kind of big hamburger, the other commercial being of a topless woman acting out stereotypical male behavior.

Someone just sent me a link explaining that over in Russia there is a competition going whereby my Home Office is being compared with that of Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer. Unfortunately I can’t read a single word of Russian so I’ve got no clue what the battle of the offices is about but I thought it was rather hillarious! See for yourself! There are, of course, other people who fell for the Russian joke and actually do think that this is Mr. Ballmer’s office. Unfortunately (for Steve!), he probably wouldn’t feel very much at home in my office… there are computers here that run Linux, you see. That might be too much to handle and cope with.